This is long but I just needed to let it out somewhere since it's been bothering me a little bit.
I recently joined the pharmacy team at my store from the customer service desk so I'm a little new. Being from the service desk, I'd like to think that I grew enough thick skin to brush off rude and angry people and not let them get to me. I've been a little stressed and sleep deprived from upcoming finals and due dates for research papers which I think resulted in my being a little more sensitive than usual last Friday.
Had a patient at pick-up, did the usual, "Hi! How are you? How can I help you today?" spiel. While I was looking up his Rx, it stated that we needed a new insurance card for him. Told him the price of all of his meds and asked if he had a new insurance card so he wouldn't have to pay full price. Said he did but was confused as to why it wasn't on there, so I went ahead and took his card back there to input the info. There were some issues on some Rxs, but it had not even been two minutes before he started talking loudly saying he has never had this issue until I helped him out and that no one has ever asked him for this, and that he just wanted to pay cash and leave. Ok, that's perfectly fine since that's his decision.
Once I had everything together, I worked as fast as I could. However, he had to acknowledge HIPPA and the computer wouldn't let us complete the process until he had. I politely let him know and he started saying he never had to do it before until me and he didn't know why I was making him doing a bunch of unnecessary things. I stopped smiling at that point because he was just being plain rude and impatient. Yelled at me because he couldn't understand what it meant when it asked him who he was signing as as well... then it took him five times to finally hit the "accept" button because he was angrily hitting the screen with the pen and missing it after I asked him to hit accept for me. He started giving me dirty looks and mumbling under his breath while I rang his other merchandise up. I finally told him his total once I was finished and TOUCHED the pinpad we were using in order to show him, since many people get confused with which one out of the two we have to use. He still asked me angrily which pinpad to use.
At this point my eyes were tearing up because I was just genuinely frustrated and confused as to how I was just trying to be nice and help him and I was nothing but polite. The whole time he kept looking at me right into my eyes and I think it was obvious they were watering up. I was in the process of bagging his stuff until he told me I was the worst service he has received and luckily another tech was behind me so I asked her to finish it up for me since I was on the verge of crying. Ended up in the bathroom until I calmed down enough. I felt ridiculous for crying over something so dumb, since my interaction with him was nothing compared to other customers. Luckily, the next patient I helped was very friendly and thanked me for giving him good customer service. Dunno how our next interaction will be like though and I'm def not excited for it.